Venue; Barcelona Event; Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2012 Car; Ford B-Max Ford has often been regarded (myself included) as a trusted and loyal friend of many a motorist. The addition of voice-recognition technology as part of its new “synch” technology unveiled at this year’s MWC can only add to comparisons with the faithful companion traits of its canine counterparts. Not having tried this for myself, I’d like to think it would be as responsive as any a well-trained pooch. Whilst this technology has been available in the US since 2007, significant changes have had to be made to adapting to work across this side of the pond. Is it more or does the new shape and form also share a touch of the terrier in its looks too?

Nearly six years on and twitter has just soared above the 500 million user mark. By my reckoning, that’s about 250,000 new users a day flocking to register with twitter. Also sitting pretty is Facebook, who must surely account for the next social media milestone at some point this year in reaching the 1 billion user mark. Anyone like to have a guess when they might celebrate reaching this key milestone?

With Microsoft’s Windows 8 beta release literally hot off the virtual press, first impressions are looking favourable. With significant changes in the UI design and interaction behaviours, it’s going to be really interesting to watch if and how new users take to this OS upgrade.

Google’s hotly debated privacy rules revision have now gone live, distilling a previous set of 60 disparate (and often inconsistent) privacy statements into one. Google claims this will help them provide a better cross-channel browsing and search experience by combining more user data across the various products within the Google family. Meanwhile, data protection lawyers and privacy advocates point towards its failure to meet the core requirements of the European 1995 Data Protection Act. Good for the user or good for Google? Or, maybe both? Leaving Data protection issues aside for a moment, this ultimately comes down to the experience Google serves up to its users with the broadening of its cross-product data pollination potential. Users - watch this space.